2010-04-05

Spell checking with multiple languages

I do most of my writing in English but I am learning German. Consequently, I try to keep my computer's user interface in German. GNOME applications often have spell-checking built in, though, and since my user's locale is set to German, so is the spell-checking.

I have long intended to write a patch for the spell checking library, enchant, to be able to automatically detect which language you're typing in based on n-grams. However, ever busy and lazy, I have instead decided to copy my English word list to be my German custom words dictionary.

So, on Fedora 12, I installed the package "words" and then copied the file at /usr/share/dict/words to $HOME/.config/enchant/de_DE.dic. Tada. It now thinks that 479829 English words are custom German dictionary entries.